I would guess because it was the first generation of Lenovo laptops with the i series of Intel processors. Businesses bought them up and leased them like wildfire. I have two myself and they are generally cheap on fleabay.

I bought one with an i5 processor and another came standard with an i7 processor. Both were off-lease refurbs.

Indeed, old computers can be used as test mules, provided they are not connected to Internet and access is restricted (because much AV SW does not run on older os).

One fool bureaucracy was claiming that engineering departments had two PCs per employee. Well of course the departments said, there are lab mules and the extra computer many SW engineers had to run special SW. Though even then the suspicion was that people had not told financial people when a computer was scrapped.